Sesame Street/IRC partnership

About this entry

Our goal is to help children and families affected by the global refugee crisis. Of the 65 million displaced people globally, half are children and 12 million of those are younger than eight. These children have often suffered the effects of violence and neglect, frequently leading to toxic stress, which can have lifelong damaging effects on learning, behavior, and health. But children are resilient, and damage can be reduced if they are reached early.

This partnership between the International Rescue Committee and Sesame Workshop, home of the trusted Sesame Street Muppets, aims to create multimedia content —adapted to reflect the experiences of refugee children and their parents— to meet critical developmental needs and mitigate the effects of adverse childhood experiences in crisis settings.

To help raise awareness and generate support for this work, the IRC and Sesame Street launched an integrated campaign across social media, leveraging each organization's strong brand and following to drive engagement.

Why does this entry deserve to win?

Our focus is clear: to show how we are, together, working to give Syrian refugee children the opportunity of an education. On social media, our strategy has been to be as clear about the facts and their solutions as possible--while really utilizing the powerful images of Muppets making a difference in children refugees' lives.

Tactically, we have made sure to tie our campaign to global conversations, including but not limited to: International Children's Day, World Book Day, World Refugee Day, and Back to School. These have served as some of our marquee dates to engage and educate the public about the refugee crisis and our efforts to support children and families affected. On these dates and throughout the year, we've shared compelling videos, photos, graphics across both Sesame Street and the International Rescue Committee's social channels with images of our programs in action.

One of the IRC's top-performing Facebook posts so far for the campaign, for instance, was on World Book Day and gained 5,000 likes and 620 shares, reaching 200,000 people organically. Whether sharing new media coverage or photos of our programs in action, we have really owned and maintained consistency in our use of the #SSTxIRC hashtag across all social platforms, on both Sesame Street and the International Rescue Committee's channels.

On World Refugee Day, for instance, both organizations leveraged our celebrity relationships as a way to cut through online and raise visibility of our partnership. We released two videos, one of Mandy Patinkin with Grover and another of Whoopi Goldberg and Elmo, that explained to children why this partnership is crucial-- that reached over 300,000 views. Stars like Kristen Bell also posted about their connection to both organizations and why this partnership is so crucial.

Results

Since February of 2017, our partnership has been featured in 30+ articles totaling in 2.7 million impressions, with a combined 2.6 million in publicity value. On social media, the hashtag for the initiative-- #SSTxIRC-- has received over 8M social media impressions and reached 2.7 million people. We've posted, collectively, over 150 individual times across our social accounts.

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